On signatures, standards, and my mom
Heyo,
Jules here, from Cyfrin.
Yesterday was Valentines day and I had a buggy date with my Soulmate.sol 💖.
This week
✍🏼 How do blockchain signatures work?
📆 Cyfrin ecosystem updates
📚 Signature standards, replay attacks, and ECDSA algorithm
Blockchain signatures and ECDSA algorithm
Signatures are a means for authentication - allowing operations, such as sending transactions, to verify that they originated from the intended signer account.
🤷🏻♀️ What are they used for? Validating computation performed off-chain and authorize transactions on behalf of a signer.
⚡️ When are signatures created?
Signing a message: Hashing the message and then combining this hash with the private key using the ECDSA algorithm.
Digital signature: Generated upon signing a message, serving as a means to verify that the signer is in fact the intended account.
Unique signature: Each distinct message produces a unique hash, resulting in a correspondingly unique signature.
💪🏽 Why is the ECDSA algorithm important?
ECDSA creates the private key based out of an integer (i.e
[0..n-1]) and the public key (a point in the blockchain’s ellyptic curve)ECDSA is in charge of creating signatures using a cryptographic function (i.e.
SHA256) to generate a securely random numberECDSA verifies the signature by taking the signed message, the signature produced from the signing algorithm and the public key. The output is a
validboolean.
— Read more about the ECDSA and signatures here!
This week at Cyfrin
🎨 You spoke, we listened. Cyfrin Updraft now has dark mode available!
🚀 Want to showcase your security skills? You can now add CodeHawks to your LinkedIn experience!
✨ Sneak peek - the Cyfrin brand is getting a lil update. Stay tuned!
Related articles
✍🏼 Everything you need to know about Ethereum signature standards.
⚡️ A replay attack happens when an attacker intercepts and manipulates data transmission over a network. Hint hint, they are connected to signatures!
👩🏻💻 How does the ECDSA algorithm create signatures?
Let us know what you thought of this new version of the newsletter here!
Sending lots of cyber love,
Jules 🤸🏻